Chapter XXXIII Palafox the Name
Nonplussed—In the Convent—A Warning—The Key—Permutations and Combinations—Light Ahead—Don Fernan’s Message
One day the guerrilla camp in the mountains was thrown into some excitement by the sudden reappearance of Pepito. All the guerrilleros by this time knew something of the strange complications in which the English señor was involved. They had been constantly on the look-out for the gipsy boy whom he was so anxious to see; and when, on this sunny morning, the boy was seen bounding up the hillside, they flocked to him in a crowd, crying “Qué hay de nuevo? Qué hay de nuevo?” Pepito made them no answer. He had already caught sight of his master sitting some yards above him, and rushed forward with a piercing cry of delight.
“Found, Señor!” he shouted. “Found!”
Jack needed no telling who was found.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Glad Señor is well, glad Señor is well!” shouted the little fellow. “The Señorita will be glad too. Oh, she will! When I told the Señorita—”
“Where is she?” repeated Jack impatiently.
“When I told the Señorita that Señor was ill, she jumped up; said she must come; but the old Busna looked ugly; said no; and I come to fetch Señor.”
“Pepito, tell me at once where she is.”
“Safe, at a convent near Cariñena, Señor, all among the trees and flowers. Señor can go, now he is well, and I know who will be pleased. Yes, I know!”
“You’re a good boy, Pepito.” He turned to Dugdale. “Grampus, when shall I be fit to ride?”
“Good heavens! Not for a long time. Look here, Lumsden, I’m not going to have my cure spoilt and my career ruined by you going raiding before you’re fit. Don’t laugh. I’m in dead earnest. I’m sick and tired of playing the fool at Oxford. As soon as I get home I’m going to be a doctor. New idea, you know; fresh air and cold water. The pater will laugh himself into a fit when I tell him; but don’t you see, if you back me up, and I can show you as my first case—why, bet you the old boy comes round and doubles my allowance, to encourage me. See?”
“All right!” said Jack, laughing. “But you must finish my cure quickly, for the instant I can manage it I’m going to ride over to Cariñena.”
“What for? What is there special about Cariñena?”
“Well, I’ve a—a friend there I want specially to see.”
“H’m! A friend? Bet you my first year’s fees it’s a girl. Now look here, Lumsden, don’t be a fool. An Englishman oughtn’t to marry till he’s thirty at least. I’ve got ten years yet, and it won’t be too much. It takes time to be able to face a girl without flinching, and for my part I’d rather learn Greek verbs than—”
“Oh, shut up!” exclaimed Jack. “Who said anything about marrying? Juanita—”
“Oho! Juanita! Sorry for you, my boy; no cure for that complaint. Well, I’ll take care of you, but it’ll be a long time yet before you can ride.”
Nearly a month passed away before Jack, after a few experiments, was pronounced fit to undertake the ride to Cariñena. The period of waiting was diversified by one or two expeditions against French convoys, in which Antonio achieved brilliant successes. Jack chafed at being obliged to remain inactive, and to share in these raids merely in imagination. He spent hour after hour in attempting to decipher the postscript of Don Fernan’s letter, always without success. Remembering the enigmatical phrase in the letter he himself had received in Salamanca, “Palafox the Man, Palafox the Name”, he believed that the key must be contained in that; but though he tried to fit it to the ciphered message, and made considerable demands on Dugdale’s patience, he drew no nearer to solving the puzzle, and finally gave it up in disgust.
At length the day arrived when, feeling well and strong, he set off on his ride to the convent. Pepito had several times conveyed verbal messages between him and Juanita, but nothing had been committed to paper for fear lest it should fall into the hands of the French. Guided by the boy, who rode before him, he reached the convent in the afternoon of a beautiful April day, and was at once admitted to the presence of Juanita, with whom he found the old duenna he had seen in Saragossa.
Though Juanita greeted him with as much cordiality as ever, he was conscious of a slight difference in her manner; there was not quite the same frank comradeship she had shown in Saragossa.
“I am very glad to see you looking so well, Jack,” she said. “Will you take a cup of chocolate?”
“Thanks!” replied Jack briefly. He sipped it for a brief interval without speaking, then said suddenly: “I say, Juanita, I am mighty glad you escaped, you know. It was good of Padre Consolacion to help you—after trying to persuade you to marry Miguel, too. Tell me about it.”
Without her usual animation Juanita recounted how she had been captured as she neared Morata by a party of troopers, among whom she had recognized Perez, Miguel’s one-eyed man. She had been treated kindly enough by the wife of a colonel of chasseurs, who, however, irritated her beyond endurance by constant reference to her approaching marriage. Miguel himself had only seen her once. He had asked what had become of her father’s old servant José, and shown some annoyance when she refused to answer. But she had had another and a more frequent visitor. After the capitulation, Padre Consolacion had been surprised to find that, though he had been as consistent an opponent as Don Basilio and Santiago Sass, he had not met with the same fate at the hands of the French. He could only conclude that he owed his security to the good offices of Miguel, whom, however, he now held in utter abhorrence. Making his escape from the city, he had gone into hiding at Morata, where he soon learnt of what had befallen Juanita. It was not difficult for him, with the assistance of the people of the house, to obtain secret interviews with her. On the day before Miguel went with Commissary Taberne on the foraging expedition, Juanita learnt from the colonel’s wife that pressure was to be brought to bear in high quarters for the purpose of bringing about her marriage with Don Miguel. She sent a message by a secret channel to Padre Consolacion, informing him of this alarming news. On the next evening, almost at the moment when Jack was surprising the commissary, she had slipped out of the house in the dress of one of the Spanish maid-servants, fled to where the priest was awaiting her, and by him was escorted to the convent, where she was joined in a few days by the duenna, after the sudden swoop of Antonio had cleared the place of French.
“The padre is a trump,” said Jack. “I confess I didn’t like him in Saragossa; but then, of course, he hadn’t found Miguel out. I thought he must be either stupid or something worse. I shall do him more justice in future.”
He would not perhaps have been so cordial if he had known that it was to Padre Consolacion he owed the strange alteration in Juanita’s manner which had puzzled him. When he left her in the convent, the padre’s last words had been: “Now, querida mia, though I have helped you to escape a marriage with a traitor and a villain, remember I shall not approve, I shall forbid, your marriage with a heretic. You will understand me.”
All unconscious of this, Jack waxed eloquent in praise of the padre, and went on: “Well now, I’ve something to tell you besides what you have heard from Pepito. You remember that a letter left with General Palafox for my father disappeared—a letter about your property?”
“Yes. I hate the sound of the word ‘property’.”
“I have the letter. It was—perhaps you guess—in the possession of Miguel.”
He proceeded to tell the whole story. Juanita listened with growing interest, and when it was concluded every trace of her stiffness had passed away.
“Ah, Jack!” she cried, “now we can get this wretched treasure that has nearly cost your life—for but for it you would never have come to Saragossa—and then—oh! do you think we can get away to England?”
“I’m very sorry, Juanita. I was just going to tell you that I’m afraid we can’t get the treasure.”
“Why not? You said the letter was about it.”
“So it is. But, unfortunately, the secret of its whereabouts is locked up in a postscript—a single line of capital letters, which I can’t read. It is in cipher.”
“Show it to me. You have it with you?”
Jack took out the paper, and unfolded it before her. She read over the postscript letter by letter:
S E O S F L S A E O A P E J E J P J J F J P J X P A P P F
“Certainly a most curious-looking sentence,” said Juanita. “And have you no clue at all?”
“None whatever. I thought I had. I made sure I had, but when I tried to work it out in the cipher it proved useless.”
“What was it?”
“Well, I had never told anyone. Your father said I was to burn the letter as soon as I received it, and I did so; but now that things have altogether changed, there can be no harm in telling you all about it. In the letter I received at Salamanca, Don Fernan said that I was to remember the phrase, ‘Palafox the Man, Palafox the Name’. It occurred to me, of course, that the clue to the cipher might be found in that phrase; but, try it as I might, I couldn’t make anything of it. You see, the cipher message contains all the letters of the word Palafox, but there are a number of J’s and other letters that have nothing to do with it.”
“And you gave it up!” exclaimed Juanita, with some scorn. “Just like a boy!”
“Really, Juanita—” began Jack, but she interrupted him.
“Don’t talk. Let me see if I’ve a little more perseverance. I count six P’s, three A’S, one L, three F’s, two O’s, and one X; that accounts for PALAFOX. Why are there so many P’s? Besides, there are four E’S, six J’s, and three S’s. What can EJS stand for? EJS, ESJ, JES, JSE—I see it! Take an O out of PALAFOX and you have JOSÉ. That is the name of our old servant, and of the Captain-General too. Now, do you see, Señor Don Juan?—the key to the cipher is JOSÉ PALAFOX.”
“What an ass I am!” said Jack. “It never struck me that Palafox’s Christian name might be included. But what then? The only ciphering I ever did was in money sums, and weights and measures. How do you work out the thing now?”
“Why, it’s clear that my father’s message is made up of the words JOSÉ PALAFOX, which have only nine different letters. It’s not likely that the message contains only nine letters; therefore one letter of the cipher probably stands for several, and I shouldn’t wonder if all the letters of the alphabet were represented by those nine. Suppose we put down the letters of the alphabet and the other letters underneath, and see what can be made of it then.”
“We don’t know what language it is in.”
“Probably Spanish, like the letter itself. Let us try.”
She wrote down the twenty-seven letters of the Spanish alphabet, and under each the corresponding letter of the key words:—
a b c ch d e f g h i j l ll m n ñ o p q r s t u v x y z
J O S E P A L A F O X J O S E P A L A F O X J O S E P
“There you are, Jack. Now look. The first letter of the cipher, s, may stand for either c or m or x; we can’t tell which of the three until we get a little further.”
“It’s a pretty puzzle,” said Jack. “The next letter is E; that may be either ch or n or y, and if we put either of them after c, m, or x, we sha’n’t begin to make any Spanish word that I know of.”
“No,” agreed Juanita, putting her pencil to her lips. “It looks as if the sentence can’t be Spanish.”
“Don Fernan wrote to me in English. Let us try that. I’ll do it this time.”
Jack wrote down the letters of the English alphabet, placing the key-words below as before:—
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
J O S E P A L A F O X J O S E P A L A F O X J O S E
“S is either c, n, or y this time, and E is either d, o, or a. We can drop d and e, because they can’t follow any of the first three; that leaves co, no, and yo. This is getting interesting, Juanita.”
“Yes, I am getting quite excited. Now for the next letter, O. That can stand for b, j, m, u, x. I’ll write down all the combinations, and see how they look.”
They were fifteen, as follows:—
cob nob yob
coj noj yoj
com nom yom
cou nou you
cox nox yox
“Some of these are too comical for anything,” said Jack; “but we’ve one complete word, you. Let us see what the next comes to. S again; that’s c, n, or y. Then F; that’s i or t. No English word begins with ct, nt, or yt, so t goes out. Now for L; that’s g or r; and the combinations now are:—
cig nig yig
cir nir yir
I say, your father wouldn’t begin by addressing me as ‘you nigger’, would he? The next letter is S; c, n, or y again. Not a single one of them helps to make a word. We are on the wrong track, Juanita.”
“Perhaps the first word is not you at all.”
“Well, let’s go back and see how many of the fifteen combinations of the first three letters will fit on to the fourth. It’s quite clear that you can’t make a word by putting c or y after any of them; there’s only n left, and all we can make is coun and noun. Don Fernan wouldn’t go in for grammar, would he? If we drop noun we’ve only coun, and that looks most unlikely.”
“Be quick with the next letter, Jack. Why do you talk so much? I could jump with excitement.”
“Don’t be in a hurry; perhaps the whole thing will come to grief again. The next letter is F; that stands for i or t; i won’t do, but t will, and we get count; that’s a word at any rate. I wonder what we’re to count. Now for L; that’s g or r; and S again; that’s c, n, or y. And unless I’m a Dutchman, that makes the word country.”
Juanita clapped her hands and laughed.
“You are getting clever!” she said.
The irony escaped Jack, who was busy working out the next word. In a few minutes he had made out house.
“Country house!” exclaimed Juanita. “Oh, you are slow, Jack; do be quick! What about the country house?”
But the same process had to be gone through with every letter, and it was quite half an hour before the whole message was deciphered. The excitement of Juanita and himself increased with every fresh discovery, and when the task was finished, and the simple English words were written down, each gave a gasp of relief. The message consisted of but six words:—
Country house old well twelve feet.
“I see it! I see it all!” exclaimed Juanita. “Oh, Jack, we shall get it after all! I don’t care for the treasure itself one bit really, not one bit; but I could dance with joy at defeating that wretch Miguel, and I should like to have some money to give to the poor people ruined in Saragossa. You must go, Jack. The well is in the garden behind the house, near the wall. It has not been used for many years; we got water from a new well by the kitchen. Only to think that all is coming right after all!”
“Yes,” said Jack; “Pepito and I will go to-morrow. How deep is the well, Juanita?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Twelve feet means something. You will find out what, Jack. And then—”
“Then, Juanita, for England!”